


The Vicious Calm

by Metallic_Sweet



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: (the wild boar), Canon Compliant, Dancer Dimitri, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Isolation, Mental Health Issues, Missing Scene, Sleep Deprivation, Survival Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 17:18:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20246461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: Dimitri, in the timeskip.or, living on the run when you’re running from yourself





	The Vicious Calm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vorpal_platypus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorpal_platypus/gifts).

There are days when Dimitri forgets his own name. 

Deprivation does that to a person. Deprivation of sleep, food, water, adequate shelter. He lies for days, nights, sometimes multiples together and doesn’t notice. Doesn’t think. Not because he wants to, but because his body just won’t do it any longer. Won’t do him. Won’t do life or death or anything except exist. 

So, for an age, he wraps himself around his spear and exists. 

When Dimitri was young—

That’s not right. 

When he was nearly a man, he went to school. 

It was after he was young because he already knew that he was a beast. Wild boar, Felix called him. 

Felix wasn’t young either. He was no longer the quick little fawn that used to run ahead of Dimitri, Sylvain, and Ingrid. Sylvain used to lag behind, shouting for them to wait up. Ingrid didn’t get to play with them often, but when she did, Felix wouldn’t run too far because she would organise them into the best games based on the stories of knights and great battles. Glenn was the only one who could find them in those games, hands on his hips as he looked up at them pretending to be birds or monkeys in the trees. 

“Get down from there,” Glenn would say, and they would because he never told on them. 

By the time they were all in school together, Glenn was dead. Felix was changed. Sylvain was bitter. Ingrid took refuge in her honour against her grief. Dimitri understood them, and he was sorry because he couldn’t lead them, not into a world that could give them back the dead or relieve them of their Crests. He didn’t blame them for their anger, and Felix’s sharp, unkind words for him were more than justified. 

But those school days: Dimitri remembers them. Not with the absolute clarity of Duscar, nor the red-tinted haze of everything that has come after. He remembers that handful of years spent at Garreg Mach as a time of quiet. Preparation. Food in the kitchens. The temperate breeze. 

He remembers most often Dedue. Not training or studying but Dedue in the greenhouse. Dimitri had no talent for gardening, just as he lacks talent for needlework, cooking, or any skill that requires delicacy. Dimitri remembers sitting with Dedue as he repotted seedlings or spread bone meal, often late at night when they both should have been asleep. Some of those nights, watching Dedue garden was the only thing that would calm him. Like how Dimitri imagined prayer must be for the faithful. 

They never spoke on those nights. They knew what they were thinking about. 

As the sun rose, they would sneak back out of the greenhouse and to Dedue’s rooms. They would clean their hands, and Dimitri would brew tea on water brought up for their wash basins. Ginger for Dedue, chamomile for himself. In the beginning, Dimitri would light Dedue’s hearth to boil the kettle. Later, when they had both learned a bit of magic, Dedue would practice his Fire this way. They would drink their tea, sitting together back to back. 

Slumped with his back against another crumbling ruin:

Dimitri remembers this sort of thing. 

The only mercy of this kind of existence is that Dimitri has very little concept of time. His day could in fact be multiple days running together, nights indistinguishable because Dimitri doesn’t really register the change in temperature or light source. It is all the same. All a red-tinted haze.

He comes back to himself occasionally and realises he is coated in dried mud, sweat, and gore.

He wonders if he should be ashamed. 

He wonders if he is alive or dead.

The worst part is that much of his thoughts that aren’t devoted to death, war, and revenge are largely reasonable. He is aware that the spectres of his parents and Glenn are probably not entirely real. They are manifestations, reminders, and he chooses to indulge them rather than the other way around. They are dead, and the dead cannot advocate for themselves. That is why he is here. 

If this makes him dead in a living body, a feral beast, then that is right. Their lives, ended so unjustly, deserve his life and being. To be their vessel:

Dimitri is irrelevant. 

One evening, Dimitri wakes to his eye throbbing. 

His ever-present headache is worse. He feels nauseous. 

He crawls to the lip of the cave he’s sheltering in to prod his hearth back to life. Pulls the cleaning cloth off the head of his spear. He untangles the cover he’s taken to wearing over his bad eye, swallowing against the roll of nausea in his stomach. The scars and the lower lid reflect back red and inflamed on the silver. 

He hears a noise. A groan. It takes him a moment to realise it was himself. 

Dimitri has no talent for healing magic. It requires faith, and he has previous little of that. He remembers, suddenly, how Byleth somehow got him into fighting form to win the White Heron Cup. Dimitri stares at his red, weeping eye and thinks about the absurdity. He hasn’t danced since he hit the floor of that prison cell. He wonders if he is even capable of it any longer. Of doing anything beautiful. 

Byleth would have stared at him. Head tilted and hand beneath chin. Waiting, as always, for Dimitri to find an answer. 

They don’t know if Byleth is dead. When that massive dragon descended upon the battlefield, Dimitri saw Blyleth running towards it, the Creator’s Sword raised. That image of the professor’s back is burned into his memory. 

_No!_ he’d wanted to shout. 

_Don’t leave me,_ he should have begged. 

He doesn’t know if he could have made Byleth stay. If he could have cut through his own battle madness, or if he could have been heard over the fray. Watching Byleth run into the path of the beast is just another of his regrets. 

Dimitri has many regrets. Right now, thinking about Byleth as he tries to decide if he wants to attempt using his only antitoxin on his eye, he regrets not learning more magic. Or studying more with Manuela, even though her personality made him nervous and her lessons on the human body made him think of better ways to dismember people. He doesn’t even know if antitoxin works for non-magical infection. 

“Damn,” he whispers before taking a deep breath and dumping the vial into his face.

It burns.

But at least he blacks out.

There are no spectres in this type of unconsciousness.

Sometimes Dimitri dreams.

It’s not often. He doesn’t sleep enough or regularly to dream much, and when he does sleep, he’s often is too tired to dream. Darkness, impenetrable, is preferable to nightmares. To spectres. 

After pouring the antitoxin over his face, though, he does dream. Maybe it is a side effect of using the medicine not as intended. Maybe it is because he is feverish. Maybe it is because he thought of Byleth and regrets. It could be any one of these innumerable things. 

Dimitri dreams of Mercedes and her needlework. Her room in the monastery was always a quiet space. Dimitri had felt out of place when he visited her there and ashamed of his inability to be gentle. She was always so patient with him, even as he bent all of her needles, even the thickest for under armour, out of shape. 

In the dream, he sits in her desk chair as she works on a lace sampler. One of the students she sings with in the Choir is getting married, although Dimitri has no idea which one. Back then, if they weren’t in Blue Lion and did not come to the Knights or Training Halls, Dimitri wouldn’t have known them. He didn’t go anywhere else with regularity aside from the nights spent in the greenhouse with Dedue. 

(No. That’s not entirely right. There was somewhere else that Dimitri often went when the spectres were chasing him. But he does not think about that. No.)

Dream Mercedes looks up. To him. She smiles, a soft expression that does not entirely reach her eyes. Her smiles were almost always like that. Her heart tempered by the reality of the world. 

“Your dancing is improving,” she says. 

Dimitri starts to open his mouth, but his voice catches in his throat. 

He remembers. Dancing for her. Aside from practicing with Manuela and Byleth, he danced for Mercedes the most on the battlefield. She was the most gifted healer of their generation, and she could cast Fortify with such intensity that their troops felt as if they could hear the Goddess herself. Dimitri had felt blessed to witness her work. Mercedes herself never thought much of her own ability. 

“Yes,” she murmurs, and the smile starts to reach her eyes, hinged with humour and a warm fondness. “You should not be so surprised. You give yourself to everything you do.” 

There’s a pulling. Deep in his chest. Gut. Dimitri swallows. Mercedes doesn’t seem to notice as she smiles so warmly at him. 

_I don’t deserve that,_ he wants to say.

But he doesn’t. He knows that it would hurt her, even if she is just a dream. Mercedes knew his pain somehow, even though she had not witnessed the Tragedy of Duscur nor the battlefield until they were sent out against bandits. 

His last memory of Mercedes is how she, in the rubble of the broken cathedral, pulled the student for whom she had made a wedding veil from beneath a shattered stone beam. Her face was as determined as pained. She caught his eye for a moment. Jerked her chin.

_Go_

Dedue was already herding Dimitri away. Claude had long gone, rushing from the chaos with only a backwards glance. His expression, as he flew off on his wyvern’s back, was exactly like Mercedes. 

Dimitri does not know what he looked like, but it was only her, Dedue, and Claude who looked him in the eye that terrible day. 

None of this should have happened. 

“Mercedes,” he starts. 

He jerks awake. 

Voices. Real voices. 

Close. 

His hearth has burnt out. His head throbs. He can feel that his eye is still swollen, and he cannot open it. His good eye is open, but it is the dead of night and it is dark. His entire body aches. 

“…a light?” one of the voices is saying. 

“When we were just leaving the village,” another answers. “Somewhere around here.”

“It’s too cold,” a third says, and Dimitri can identify at least four additional footfalls. “I doubt anyone would be sheltering here.” 

“I know what I saw,” the second speaker says, louder and with a lilt to her pronunciation that gives away noble education. “Even if it’s just a thief, we have our duty—”

_Duty_, Dimitri mouths as he reaches for his spear. 

“Yeah, yeah,” the third voice grumbles. 

“Come on,” the first voice, also with a noble lilt, grumbles, “this place is giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

Vegetation crunching. Boots. These aren’t rogues or bandits. This is a patrol of some sort. They don’t have a Faerghus accent, which even with extensive elocution lessons most of the Kingdom nobles carry on their _u_. They don’t have the mixed accents present in most Alliance patrol and battalion compositions. Garreg Mach’s forces are no more. 

Dimitri rolls onto his belly. Listens to the footfalls. At least eight. Probably more. Braces his fist around his spear. Tilts the shaft just enough to leverage himself slowly. Silently.

A torch light, filtering through the right lip of the cave. 

A voice, against the shell of his ear:

_Duty_

The world goes red.

Wild boar. 

The soak of blood in his sleeves. The taste of it in his mouth. Between his teeth.

A crunch. 

Did he bite his tongue? Did he bite his enemy? He doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. 

The boar fights tooth and nail. The spearhead his tusks. He breathes deep and low and slow. Does not need to see. Does not need to feel. 

Crunch. Beneath him. Above him, screaming. Shrieking. 

“Monster!” one wails before Dimitri snaps his neck. 

“How is this human?” another cries before Dimitri rams him through the gut. 

“No!” another gasps, unable to move before Dimitri sinks his fingers into her throat. 

Fire. The dropped torch, sputtering out in the mess. Dirt. Mud. Blood, vomit, waste.

Dimitri looks down. Bodies. Flesh. Armour. Weapons. 

Bathed in red. 

Wild boar.

Later later _later_ later:

Dimitri wakes up. 

He blinks at the sky overhead. It is overcast. The sun is cloaked by thick clouds, a faint yellow disk. It is like summers in Faerghus. When the angelica would bloom. Hearty plants, climbing as high as possible towards the weak sunlight filtering through the cloud cover. How many times did he watch Dedue cut them in the greenhouse and lay the roots out to dry? 

A crunch. Squawking. 

He turns his head. Flies lift off his face. From his hair. Eye. 

There are carrion birds scabbling over the tongue and lips of one of the soldiers. Dimitri lies surrounded. 

Slowly, flies and dried blood flaking off with each movement, Dimitri sits up. 

In the pale light, the soldiers number sixteen red and gold bloated, twisted corpses. Dimitri spots his spear pinning one of the bodies, gone through the gut out the back and stuck to the base of a tree. It appears that flies are already laying their eggs within that gaping belly wound. 

Dimitri rolls onto his knees. Presses his hands on the soiled earth. He staggers upright, sending the carrion birds squealing several paces back. A fox, picking at a hand, scatters into the brush. Something slick and stinking falls out of his hair and slops on the back of his neck. 

He hears himself grunt. Takes a step to steady himself. 

The soldier on the tree twitches and moans. 

Dimitri turns. Steps. Right. Left. Into stinking intestines. Over a head half cleaved from the neck. His head pounds. His mouth is full of slick sweet. Drool dribbles down his chin. 

“You,” he says.

The soldier opens his eyes. Bloodshot and yellowed. Vomit has dried on his chin. On the breastplate that did nothing. His gums weep blood. If the wound in his belly doesn’t kill him, he’ll asphyxiate. 

Dimitri closes his fist around the spear’s shaft. Watches how the soldier’s eyes roll. 

“No,” the man croaks, chokes. “Goddess, please—”

“Tell me,” Dimitri breathes, the first intelligent words he has spoken in an age, “where you were headed.” 

The man moans. Senseless. Dimitri breathes in. Out. Drools. 

“Tell me,” he says, tightening his grip on the shaft.

“Please,” the man gurgles, and he twitches and chokes for his effort. “Garreg Mach. I don’t know anything more, please, Goddess, take me, please, show mercy—”

Dimitri coughs. Laughs. He jerks the spear. It slides free without resistance. Flies and fresh maggots explode around them. 

“The Goddess is not here,” he growls. 

He raises his spear. Towards the sun. The clouds. The sky. 

“The Goddess does not care.” 

He arcs. Twists. 

Once upon a time, Byleth bid him dance. Manuela guided his hands late at night. Dedue couldn’t hide his smile even as Dimitri stepped all over both his and his own feet. 

The swell of music—

Those halcyon days—

Dimitri is neither alive nor dead. In the place of what was once a man exists a beast. 

Even if he kills Edlegard, even if he brings the dead vengeance, even if if _if_— 

In the fire and terror of his nightmares: 

Dimitri remembers red. He remembers how flesh squelched between his nails and dried on the back of his hands. He remembers aching in the back of his head. Looking back, he must have hit it when his father tossed him from the carriage. Perhaps that is why he survived. His short unconsciousness and concussion made his small, eleven-year-old body inconsequential in the chaos.

Why he survived, why he heard his father’s and Glenn’s and dozens of dying pleas: he could have driven himself mad asking these questions. 

But instead—

Dimitri raids the bodies. 

Their supplies. Travel rations. A sword. Several vials of Concoction and two Antitoxin. Bandage strips, a map torn in the middle, a packet of candied ginger half-soaked in black-grey fluid. 

He drinks a Concoction and throws another Antitoxin on his eye. It burns less than before, and, when he looks at it in the silver of his spear, the lids appear less inflamed. His vision is no better, but it never will be. He wraps the eye in the new bandages, the only clean part of himself aside from his spear. He eats the ginger with unclean fingers, hunched as the beast he is over a torn map.

Garreg Mach is three days travel to the east. If he does not rest, he could get there in two. 

He rises. Looks to the east. The sun is setting among the thickening clouds. 

Around him, the stink of decay keeps anything human away. Carrion birds, foxes, and rats feast upon the free meal among the flies. 

Spear in hand:

Dimitri advances.


End file.
